The hand that robs the cradle: why does cinema still demonise grieving mothers?

The hand that robs the cradle: why does cinema still demonise grieving mothers?

In The Huntsman: Winter’s War and The Ones Below, unspeakable deeds are done by women driven crazy by the loss of a child. Decades of movies suggest they are incapable of rational grief, while men are let off the hook in the heroic pursuit of revenge

Literally turned into an ice queen by the death of her daughter … Emily Blunt, left, and Charlize Theron in The Huntsman: Winter’s War.
Photograph: Giles Keyte/PR Company Handout

Here’s a 36-year-old spoiler. The villain in Friday the 13th is not Jason, presumed dead after drowning aged 10, now back from the ashes and mad as hell. Rather it’s his mother, Pamela, a summer camp cook who grief has turned bloodthirsty. While her son, alongside stablemates Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger and Norman Bates, is afforded complicated psychological motivation for his later killing sprees, sensibly dressed Mrs Voorhees is just a woman completely unravelled by the loss of her offspring.

This is horror-movie shorthand. It was, after all, shamelessly recycled for Laurie Metcalf’s character in Scream 2. But it is also, it turns out, a template alive and kicking in today’s biggest blockbusters and classiest dramas. There were shades of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (bereaved babysitter breastfeeds young charge, then tries to top its mother) in last month’s London-set Polanski-esque thriller The Ones Below. That film involves a woman who miscarries hatching a complex plot to steal her neighbour’s baby after indulging in icky selfies while faux-suckling.

This week, we have The Huntsman: Winter’s War, in which Emily Blunt is literally turned into an ice queen by the death of her daughter, then sets about raising child soldiers and waging war on those who dare to believe in the idea of family. We also have Couple in a Hole, a fascinating drama in which grief leads parents to go feral in rural France. No prizes for guessing which of the pair is more dedicated to the plan …

“There is still a romanticised notion of motherhood in our culture,” says Denise Turner, a lecturer in social work at the University of Sussex whose research focuses on bereaved parents. “To be an archetypal ‘mother’ is to be selfless: endlessly loving and without negative emotion. To be a ‘good’ mother is also to nurture your children – certainly not to ‘let’ your child die. There are ever-increasing expectations on mothers to entertain and nurture children, often to impossible standards. Therefore, death is the ultimate failure of motherhood.”

Targeted by a grieving mother fixated by her foetus … Isla Fisher in Visions. Photograph: Allstar/Chapter One Films

The scant choice of female backstories offered by cinema – and the offensiveness of many of them – can be seen as one of the more obvious iterations of a longstanding inequality that is being addressed in the current diversity debate. But it is also one of the most insidious. Identical ideas are transferred from film to film, regardless of genre or psychological ambition, and as cliches become tropes, so they move further into the realm of received cultural wisdom. The Ones Below, for instance, is a sister to 2007 French thriller Inside, and last year’s Isla Fisher vehicle Visions, both of which have pregnant women targeted by grieving mothers fixated with their foetuses.

“Many women – and some men – who have experienced miscarriage can feel very jealous of women with babies,” says Ruth Bender-Atik, national director of the Miscarriage Association. “But there is a world of difference between wanting that baby to be yours and actually taking it. Fictional media – and to some extent the print and broadcast media – can still be driven by exaggeration and shock.”

The message from cinema is clear: women whose children have died are dangerous and if they won’t try and steal someone else’s, they will make life hell for any “functional” family.

“I think that culturally we need mothers to go mad because it is unthinkable to us that children die – mothers cannot ‘survive’ this event because we can’t survive this event,” says Turner. “It’s also possible that there is a cultural penitence in mothers going mad it’s their punishment for letting the child die.”

Turner lost her own son, Joe, when he was 19 months old. In the past, she has suggested that mothers may not be broken by the death of a child and that with time, they can find strength. Yet this, she believes, is an “unacceptable thing to say, culturally”.

Rebecca de Mornay in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992). Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Buena Vista

Film perpetuates the notion that, rather than gaining strength from their grief and ultimately learning to live with their loss, women are transformed into something monstrous, robbed of the softening glow that motherhood traditionally brings. In Young Adult, Charlize Theron’s vicious ex-prom queen tries to pull apart her childhood sweetheart’s happy young family, ultimately revealing – in a scene involving a symbolic spilt glass of red wine at a baby’s naming ceremony – that a miscarriage prevented her from being a mother. In Serena, Jennifer Lawrence’s loss curdles her into a killing machine, dead set on making others – especially healthy children – suffer.

Such characters are seen to have, by virtue of their own tragic circumstance, transgressed and abandoned the norms thrust upon them. They have become “the other” in comparison with women who do have children. Male characters, too, are frequently seen as transformed by grief – many of them spurred by the death of a child down equally bloody paths.

But there is a key difference. The reaction of men is generally presented as rational – if over-energetic – driven by an honourable and even aspirational thirst for justice. In The Outlaw Josey Wales, Gladiator, Edge of Darkness and, most recently, The Revenant, it is made easy to root for a dad wishing to see his child’s death avenged. The validity of the quest is rarely questioned. Indeed, it is turned into poetry. Leonardo DiCaprio’s hallucinations of his dead family are sublime, not ridiculous.

But when the same thing happens to a woman, her journey is shown as lunacy. Rather than seeking the restoration of some balance, she is an agent of chaos. This is why you will often see a wildly differing reaction within the same film. In Lars von Trier’s 2009 horror Antichrist, Willem Dafoe’s grieving father suffers, but it is nothing compared with Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character, who ends up torturing him and mutilating herself. Last year’s update on Macbeth chopped out much of the text, but added something new: a baby, buried in the opening scene, to better explain Marion Cotillard’s later excesses.

As part of her research, Turner collated responses to the grieving process from both genders. She then presented them to groups of women and found a similar difference. “The group that looked at a man’s account of child death were very empathetic and sympathetic to his apparent helplessness, while those who looked at some of the female stories became angry with the mothers who were not ‘behaving as they should’.

“It’s largely OK for men to be angry or vengeful – look at the ‘hero myth’ – and if they feel vulnerable, that’s endearing. Women don’t have those cultural permissions and these things get acted out crudely and stereotypically in film.”

While expecting fiction to authentically represent reality is unrealistic, and ultimately undesirable, the persistence of some stereotypes suggests a number of regressive views show no sign of going away. Grief is a multi-layered and deeply personal process with no correct expression. And yet film continues to insist that the loss of a child turns a woman into a monster. The subversive effect, says Turner, can be devastating – and undermine a woman at one of the most vulnerable moments in her life.

“In my experience, women may be angry, they may be feisty, they may be very protective of themselves and other children,” she says. “Above all, they are people – affected by other parts of their identity and life experience. They are never simply ‘bereaved’. And the lack of cultural permission to be anything but ‘bereaved’ – which is to say mad, terminally grieving or depressed – can make it difficult for women to have any role models for what this experience can look like.”

At the moment, cinema serves those in this position with the likes of frosty Emily Blunt, Charlize Theron hissing bitchily and Charlotte Gainsbourg doing unspeakable things with a pair of scissors. And looming over them all, the godmother: grief-stricken Pamela, with her neat perm and perfect teeth and massive gleaming knife.